The Italian American Experience
Authors: Michael Buonanno and Laurie Buonanno
Abstract: The Italian American Experience is an e-text that examines the experience of Italians in the United States from an interdisciplinary perspective. We explore the push and pull factors during the peak years of Italian emigration: the culture, society, economy, and government they left behind, and the new world they entered. During our exploration, we will study questions of identity, citizenship, worldview, family structure, religion, folklore, politics, and society from the perspective of the Italian immigrants to America. We will employ case studies to illustrate the formative Twentieth Century experiences of Italian-Americans as anarchists, union organizers, mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters, grandmothers and grandfathers, breadwinners, and artists, employing the many lenses from which they have been interpreted, both in America and Italy: for example, the Sacco and Vanzetti trials and executions, the Albano-Ficarotto lynchings in Tampa, Enrico Caruso’s meteoric rise from Neapolitan street corner singer to Puccini’s favorite tenor to his untimely death. Although the vast majority of immigration occurred between the late 19th and mid-20th centuries, the Italian-American experience continues to evolve and we will take a moment to explore that evolution as well:
Portal
The Italian Diaspora
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Who are we? Where did we come from? Where did we go to? In what numbers? What were the factors that pushed us away from our old homes and pulled us to our new? What impact did we have on the places that we left and the places that we settled? And, finally, where are we going?
The Italian diaspora, though characterized by innumerable variations of
language and culture, is characterized as well in all its various manifestations
by a profound sense of ethnic identity. Even for those of us who don’t speak
the language, there is a particular reality born of Sunday dinners at Grandmother’s,
the sound of Italian—or more likely Sicilian or Neapolitan or another of the
Italian dialects—at the kitchen table, and the innumerable stories that we heard
there: stories of the people back home in Italy and stories of the people just
down the street. There was the particularly gluttonous Benedictine back home
who gave gnocchi its nickname, stranga lu prev, (strangle the
priest). And the woman down the street who upset at her husband’s extravagance
(indoor plumbing), nicknamed the unhappy man bagnarol
(bathtub) only to discover one day that her own nickname was—and
to this day is--moglia di bagnarol (wife of bathtub). There was the mythical
Italian who crossed the
In my fieldwork with the Seneca Nation of Indians I have sometimes heard the complaint that when non-natives borrow Native-American religions, they oversimplify them, making them seem trivial or superficial. A person has to have grown up in the culture to really understand the nuances of the religion, some Seneca say, or, they claim that the culture is the soil which nurtures the religion and makes it bloom. These Seneca do make a point. There is a reality to being immersed in a singular cultural environment that places a stamp on one’s life and the meaning that one finds there.
In this study, we will explore the Italian-American cultural milieu and the ethnic identity that it has forged.
Table of Contents
3: The Voyage
7: Folklore
Copyright: FEB 24 2005